Artistic image suggesting both selfies and surveillance. — Photo by The Humantra on Unsplash (modified)

Reimagining Communication: Epistemologies and the Future of Communication Studies

ICA Preconference 2022 | Paris, France

Michael Filimowicz, PhD

Published in

Higher Neurons

4 min readOct 27, 2021

Event Details

This event ran in May 2022.

Background

In 2020, over 80 scholars from 19 countries came together as published authors in the new Routledge Communication Studies book series, Reimagining Communication, across four volumes: Meaning, Experience, Action and Mediation. The chapters collectively undertook a major forward-looking, interdisciplinary and international investigation of the general ‘information architecture’ of communication. But due to the global pandemic, a planned in-person symposium exploring the future of media studies was unable to take place. The editors and contributors to these volumes have thus organized this preconference event to continue lines of inquiry opened up by this new network of researchers, and to engage with other scholars on the theme of Epistemologies and the Future of Communication Studies.

Theme

Communication has always been rife with tensions between the critical traditions of humanistic scholars, data-driven research of social scientific researchers, the professional orientation of media practitioners, and applied technical communication design practices such as audiovisual media production and electronic publishing. If we include related fields such as computational methods and computer mediated communication, which are traditionally associated with computer science, we can say that in its richest interdisciplinary configurations, communication methodologies cut across all four of the general epistemic domains identified by Cresswell: constructivist, pragmatist, transformative and post-positivist. Our objective with this pre-conference is to interrogate, catalogue, and thematize the epistemic transgressions and emergent methodologies — including both conceptual and technological tools — that facilitate intellectual leavening and disciplinary boundary expansion, similar in spirit to the ICA-supported Rethinking Communication volumes (Dervin, Grossberg, O’Keefe, & Wartella, 1989) that appeared 30 years prior to exemplify and advance “the diversity of perspectives and theoretical problems that currently occupy the attention of the field.”

Division Affiliation

Philosophy, Theory and Critique

When

Wednesday, May 25th, 2022

Location

Getting There

Université Paris 8
2, rue de la Liberté
93 200 Saint-Denis

Metro: line 13, stop “Saint-Denis Université”
Tram: line 5, stop “Guynemer”
Bus: line 154, 253, 255, 256, 268, 356 and 361, stop “Saint-Denis Université”.

The event will be held in the Maison de la recherche, which is the brown building at the far left below, in room MR 002 which is right at the main entrance:

Schedule

8:30–8:50 — Coffee / Refreshments

8:50–9:00 —Opening Remarks

9:00–10:00 — Presentations #1: Industry

10:00–10:30 — Presentation Panel #1, Q&A

10:30–10:45 — Coffee / Refreshments

10:45–11:45 — Presentations #2: Social Media

11:45–12:15 — Presentation Panel #2, Q&A

12:15 -1:45 — Lunch Break (90 min)

1:45–2:45 — Presentations #3: Technologies

2:45–3:15 — Presentation Panel #3, Q&A

3:15–3:30 — Coffee / Refreshments

3:30- 4:30 — Presentations #4: Information (incl. Keynote)

4:30–5:00 — Presentation Panel #4, Q&A

5:00–5:30 — Coffee / Refreshments Wind Down

Presentation Groupings:

Presentations #1: Industry, panel moderated by Henrik Bødker

Translating positivist audience data into pragmatic action in media industry — Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt & Marju Himma-Kadakas

Third Way Media: Toward a New Framework of Media Analysis — Joe Cruz

History and the Culture Industry From the critique of the media to the critique of contemporary capitalism — Christophe Magis

Presentations #2: Social Media, panel moderated by Sara Monaci

Reframing documentary and social media through a media theory informed by platformization and ‘the stack’ — Sean Maher

Like, Share, Survive: A Semantic Network Analysis of Dedicated Mental Health Twitter Accounts and the Creation of Virtual Networks of Social Support — Lee Shaw

Disinformed citizenship and other deliverables of polluted information ecosystems— Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Page Bucy